


Over Easy

by kaffyrutsky



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Drama, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-28
Updated: 2009-09-27
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaffyrutsky/pseuds/kaffyrutsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As eggs go, Blon was slightly scrambled. The story Jack, Rose and the Doctor learned on Raxacoricofallapatorius might best be described as deviled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Poached

**Author's Note:**

> The existence of the Slitheen has always left me with an itch to explore the planet on which they were, apparently, such despised aberrations. And the more I explored the planet, and its non-criminal inhabitants, the more I realized what might have really happened.  
> As always the BBC owns the Whoniverse and its characters. I am grateful for being allowed to play here for awhile, and to do a small bit of creation therein. I do it out of love.  
> Many thanks to my Best Beloved, who edited and made certain that my thoughts on evolution were logical, if not necessarily scientific.  
> (One quick note: Brady and Hindley were the perpetrators of the Moors Murders between 1963 and 1965, and definitely might resonate with anyone who'd met the Slitheen clan. Rose would have known of them, less because of a resurgence of interest in their cases during the mid 1980s than because of obituaries for Hindley, who died in 2002.)

"What, like ... I dunno, Brady and Hindley? Or Jonestown?"

"Yes — No! Is like — " The little green man stopped, searching for his next words. "You have skirt people in England world? With the wailing music?"

Rose waited, hoping he'd provide a better explanation. She didn't regret doing without the TARDIS' translation, since he wanted so very much to practice "my language of humans."

But his grasp, while admirable, was erratic and incomplete, not to mention thickly accented. When he didn't speak further, she guessed. "D'you mean Scotland? The Scots?"

He smiled, which lit up his office. That, too, was disorienting; she hadn't bargained on how _attractive_ Raxacoricofallipatorians were when they weren't eight feet tall and equipped with claws and homicidal tendencies.

"Yes! Scow ... Scotland! I am check up regular on human history, my obsession, and they are like Scow - Scotland criminals." He trailed off, then brightened again. "The memory is good now - they are like Seanie Bean clan."

"Erm - the cannibals?" Rose couldn't remember much beyond some gruesome ITV "Horrors of the British Isles" fauxcumentary, but it wouldn't surprise her if Clan Slitheen ate their own kind. They certainly liked eating everyone else.

"The savage Scottish eaters and slip-backs," her host — Avrim Dul-Arm Entrepaar-Fel Havreem, according to the name plate outside his office — singsonged in continued agreement.

"Come again?"

"Slip-back — upon your pardon, let me find a better word — the reversers? No, that is wrong."

"Are we lookin' for retrograde deviant, maybe?"

Rose was grateful for the Doctor's timely intervention. The Raxcite — which term most modern citizens now preferred, he'd told her, a little embarrassed for both of them when she stumbled over the longer name — beamed at him, nodding repeatedly. "Is correct, and many thanks for your help. Retrograde ... retrograde deviant. _DEE-_vyant ... Yes, those are deevyants. My thanks for this new word!"

"Think nothing of it," the Time Lord said amiably, leaning over Rose's shoulder to speak. "Always glad t'help a budding linguist. So has Rose been wastin' your time, or keepin' you amused?"

"Oi!"

Rose glared up at him and he grinned back, unrepentant. The Raxcite eyed the two of them; if he'd had eyebrows, Rose thought, at least one of them might have been raised. "Your partner has very much the patience for my language attempts. I am very thankful for her."

"Public relations, that's why I keep her around," the Doctor said, patting her shoulder by way of apology. "Tell you what, though; my other partner" — and he nodded across the busy room outside their host's office, to where Jack was holding court with a bevy of young Raxcite clerks — "is gonna throw your entire department into chaos if we don't complete this and let you lot get back to business. So if you don't mind, I think we'll turn our translator back on, to speed things up."

Mr. Entrepaar-Fel Havreem nodded; he hit a button on his desk while the Doctor fiddled with his screwdriver. He'd undoubtedly just asked the TARDIS to start translating for them again, Rose knew, but if their Raxcite host thought she and the Doctor used a more recognizable machine translator, they might have to answer fewer questions.

"Let's review, then, shall we?" EF Havreem said, clearing a spot in front of him on the desk and picking up Blon's case file. It was hard not to notice the bright mauve "Slitheen!" stamped across its front; their attempt to pass the egg off as some nameless, clanless survivor of a Raxcite ship's manifest had been worse than useless.

_("Please don't insult my intelligence, Doctor," the customs officer had said, his liquid black eyes full of annoyance. "Only Slitheen engineer their offspring to be so grotesquely huge in-shell. The question is, how did you come by the child, and what do you expect us to do with it? I'm afraid the Port Authority can't handle this matter; you'll have to talk to Interior and Immigration. And probably Civil Defense.")_

"You were on Earth, and somehow ran into members of the Passameer-Day Slitheen clan, Fel-Fotch nomenclature," EF Havreem read from the report. "Not once, but twice? Interesting. Let's see ... they attacked various Earth outposts, presumably with the intent of robbery and violence. Somehow, authorities there not only ended the incursion, or incursions, and kept the body count below 70 — which I find admirable, if unbelievable — but managed to retrieve a viable in-shell child which some Slitheen parent had seen fit to remove from the clan's creche, wherever they've hidden it, in order to bring it along on a raiding mission."

Here EF Havreem stopped reading, and rubbed the bridge of his almost non-existent nose. Headaches, Rose had discovered during her time in the TARDIS, were a universal language. He looked at the two of them. "If I were a fiction writer, I could not have developed as exciting a story, and I admire the people of Earth all the more for what they have, apparently, accomplished against Clan Slitheen. However, you've left us with quite an ethical conundrum."

"What's the conundrum? Odd or not, Slitheen or not, you've a child here, and you need to take care of it." The Doctor flopped into the second seat in front of EF Havreem's desk and folded his arms. He looked positively mulish.

"What my friend means, is ... it's just a baby," Rose said quickly, trying to head off any Time Lord lecture on how the lesser races should rear their children. "It's not like a grown up Slitheen. Can't you, you know, educate her — it, him, her, whatever — to be law abiding?"

EF Havreem shook his head, gently, and smiled. Rose couldn't help but smile back, but his next words were anything but optimistic. "Ordinarily, I would agree with you, Ms Tyler. Every culture on our planet values children, as I imagine every Earth culture does. But the Slitheen have made it very difficult to deal with their offspring."

"You're not gonna tell me that this child isn't worth saving," the Doctor said, the Oncoming Storm clouds gathering.

"No," EF Havreem replied. "No. But ... it's a very long and sad story."

"Then enlighten us," the Doctor said, arms still crossed over his chest.

The other alien sighed and nodded. "Very well. Shall we go somewhere else? It's getting close to meal-time, and I feel the need for some fresh air."

"Let's do," the Doctor agreed. "I'll get Jack." He was up and out of the chair in one smooth motion, threading his way through the desks and cubicles of EF Havreem's department toward the Captain and his impromptu cadre. "Captain — front and center."

_tbc_


	2. Scrambled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which EF Havreem tells the team a little bit about the unusual history of Raxacoricofallapatorius. As always, the BBC owns damned near everything in the Whoniverse, and graciously allows me to play with its creations - and by "graciously" I mean, of course, that it ignores me. Thanks, guys; I'll never take coin for it.  
> (More quick notes: "Velox Levitas" is bastardized Latin for "As Fast as Lightning," which should be self-explanatory, in context.)

EF Havreem wiped his mouth precisely, and placed the napkin beside his plate. "And now, perhaps, we can begin to speak about the situation."

The Doctor nodded sharply, long fingers tapping the rim of his water glass; Jack said nothing, but watched the Doctor's face as if waiting for his next order.

Rose used her own napkin, and pushed her plate to the side. "Yes, please."

She had almost lost her own appetite when she saw the large plate of nearly raw meat the Raxcite ordered; all she could think of was the terrible joy she'd heard in Blon Fel-Fotch's voice as she and Harriet Jones hid from the hunting Slitheen's own voracious appetite. But luncheon conversation had been so low-key, so polite, so ... _civilized,_ that she'd relaxed again, and tucked into her soup and sandwich. Eventually, however, even the most civilized of meals must come to an end, and then? Well, they really couldn't avoid this conversation.

"What you must understand is what it means to every civilized citizen, of every single confederation, city-state or corporate nationality, to deal with the Slitheen issue," EF Havreem. said. "They ... Ms Tyler, how long has your humanity _been_ humanity? When did it transition from being just another animal in its ecosystem, to being the animal which could think, and feel, and look at the stars? And built towers to those stars?"

If a change of subject could cause whiplash, Rose would have been in a neck brace. But she was far more used to byzantine conversational gambits these days than she had ever been at Henrick's, and she considered an answer. "I think it's been, what, Doctor? Millions of years, yeah?"

He nodded, looking at their host with a queer glint in his eye. "Millions."

The little green man nodded. "That's right. And if you visited any number of worlds and asked the same question of their sentient species, you'd receive similar answers. No matter what kind of world, no matter if the breath of life is oxygen or methane, or if one's endo- or exoskeleton comprises carbon or silicon — or even if one has no skeleton, I suppose — the answer is generally the same. It takes millions of years before the germ of sentience flowers."

The four diners were seated next to an open bay window. Outside, a family of Raxcites walked by, slim and graceful. The parents wore very light clothing, but it complemented their forms, and looked comfortable. The three children wore less, the kind of cheerfully-patterned briefs that nursery schoolers might wear in hot weather. They were laughing at something one of their parents was saying, as they moved out of hearing.

"We Raxacoricofallapatorians cannot claim such a heritage," EF Havreem said, watching the backs of the happy family. "We were not allowed the luxury of developing naturally. We are what the cosmopolitans of this star sector call a Younger Race."

"You were engineered?" Jack's surprise was tinged with skepticism. "_Forerunner_ engineered?"

"Yes. And no," EF Havreem said, still looking out the window. "Our sentience appears to have developed within the last 10 millennia or so — galactic standard, of course, but that's close to Terran measurement, so I'm sure you can understand the almost obscene speed that represents."

"God, yes," Jack said, darting a look at the Doctor. That craggy face gave him no guidance. "I ... thought Forerunner systems were closer in to the galactic core. Aren't most of them members of Velox Levitas?"

"Even Velox Levitas species are much older than we on Raxicoricofallapatorius," EF Havreem said. "Most are at least 200 standard millennia in age. We don't fit their standards for membership any more than we fit those of the natural universe."

" 'Scuse me," Rose asked, trying to keep up, "I'm sorry, but I think I'm a bit lost. Could you maybe help me understand all this velox and forerunner business?" She leaned back in her chair as a waiter took their empty plates. "Thank you." When the waiter was gone, she looked from Jack and the Doctor to EF Havreem. "Well?"

The Doctor breathed out slowly, then joined EF Havreem in looking out the window. "Tell her, Captain."

Jack shifted uncomfortably in his seat, but nodded. "Forerunners are what we call — what we think — are a species, or perhaps a group of species, who should be better known than they are. At least some people should—" he was eying the Doctor as he said that, but stopped when he realized the Time Lord had turned from the window and had fixed two very cold blue eyes on him. "Right. They appear to have come out of the galactic center with some sort of philosophy of advancement for all. Mental advancement, physical advancement, you name it. The records show they dropped into hundreds of star systems, built colonies — more like long term laboratories, as far as the Time Agenc— as far as historians could make out. They used genetics on a scale it's almost impossible to quantify, they used geo-forming, weather-sculpting, social engineering, everything that could mold the individual and the society."

He fell silent, but continued with a frown when the Doctor said, "Go on. You're right so far."

"Their colonies stuck around on planets long enough to usher in this or that age of sentience, or enlightenment. Then, at some point only they would recognize, they'd leave.

"They cleaned up after themselves pretty obsessively, so apart from myths some planets may have from Forerunner interaction, we don't know what they called themselves or what they looked like, except that they were probably upright and bipedal. And we have no idea why they did what they did. Curiosity? Religious conviction? Galactic do-gooding, maybe, but it's anyone's guess."

"Well, that's ... that's good, isn't it?" Rose ventured. "I mean, evolution's good, right? Gettin' better, and smarter?"

"No. Not that way, not like that."

Both Jack and Rose flinched as their companion bit off the words and spit them out as if they were poison. "I'm sure EF Havreem, here, would agree."

"I do," the other alien said, heavily. He looked as grim as someone with his baby face could. "Mind you, we are not Forerunner-created; our history starts with some other would-be god, perhaps some space-faring species with more curiosity than conscience finding half-remembered Forerunner tools, and half-learning how to use them.

"But it doesn't matter who it might have been," he continued very softly, "because the end was the same. They turned the tools they found on a species just barely past hunting in packs on the veldt; used the tools on the uncomprehending animals, in an uncontrolled manner, forcing evolution so quickly that, at times, great-great grandchildren could look at pictures of their great-great grandparents and see how far they had come. How much they had changed. In fact, they could look at animals out on their present-day veldts, and spot similarities with their grandparents.

"Do you know what it does to a civilization to have such ... _immediate_ knowledge of its mindless beginnings? How it could strip a culture's ability to hold itself in self respect? What child can respect itself, when it can look upon its recent past, its recent forebears, and see nothing but a brainless carnivore?

"Consider some of our greatest and earliest tales, and many of them are heart-breaking narratives of children forced to control parents who were savage within and without ... or our earliest art and music; so much of it sprang with unnatural rapidity from attempts by newly-intelligent men and women to understand why the mother who hatched them looked like a brute, full of love, perhaps, but witless of understanding her offspring.

"If we had time, I would read you those stories, show you that art, play you that music.

"At least the Forerunners' Younger Races were spared that."

EF Havreem's voice was thick with bitter pain and self-loathing; it was hard to reconcile such sorrow with the pleasant little man who wanted to practice English in his bureaucratic cubicle. Rose ached for him. She saw horrified sympathy in Jack's eyes, too.

What she saw in the Doctor's eyes confused her.

The Raxcite sighed. "Please forgive me." He reached for a glass, drinking slowly and appreciatively of the pleasant beverage he had ordered as an after-meal sweet. The others waited; he obviously wanted to continue after he calmed down. When the glass was empty, he looked at Rose.

"Miss Rose, you asked whether evolution was not a good thing."

She nodded, and felt somehow embarrassed. EF Havreem saw that, and shook his head slightly. "You are right, I assure you of that.

"You must understand, also, that we eventually deciphered what had happened to us. Our very travails made us curious about our world, so science was just as much a child of our experience as our art. We visited the fossil records and saw how elegantly other species moved forward, compared to the forced march we underwent.

"Ultimately, we respect evolution — natural, unforced evolution, the true way of the world, you might say — as only those who yearn for something they never had can respect it."

Unexpectedly, their host smiled. "But we survived our species' ordeal, as you can see. Life has a habit of self-correction; one of our wisest philosophers, Elaun Fel-Abrid Patcheer-Dul Thereem, said 'Living well is the best revenge' and the history our world wrote for itself after such ... wrong ... beginnings proves that. We are not without our successes. We have world peace. We have the literature I spoke of, and more; we have other songs, we have dance, and medicine and architecture, the search for truth and beauty. There are many worlds out there that have not reached our level, even without our burden."

He stood up, still speaking, "Thank you so much for your patience thus far. I know it isn't our successes I've promised to explain, but I didn't think I could explain the failures, the Slitheen and their ilk, until you understood a bit of our history.

"Now, shall we walk? We'll solve the challenge of this Slitheen child, but having begun the explanation, I find that I would like to show you a favorite spot of mine, where we can sit and admire the landscape. I promise I'll finish my story there."

Rose expected the Doctor to protest yet another delay, and was almost as surprised as she was grateful when he nodded without comment, rising to accompany the Raxcite out of the restaurant. She and Jack followed.

_tbc_


	3. Fried

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story gets told in a lovely locale; it still gets darker, and sadder, at least for a bit. As always, the BBC owns the Whoniverse, and, via benign neglect, allows me to play - for free, mind - with the marvelous creations therein. Thanks, Auntie Beeb! My Best Beloved did the edit, and any mistakes are mine.  
> (Still another note: many of the Raxcite names I used here are taken, in whole or in part, from a chapter of **Captain Jack's Monster Files**, a BBC production available on the Web, in which we see some of Torchwood's files on Whoniverse villains, narrated by the Captain. I'll note that, while Torchwood appears to have some of the family genealogy correct, their operatives don't really know or understand the planet and its regular inhabitants well.)

"Mr. Havreem, this is, truly, absolutely gorgeous."

Rose gazed about, breathing deeply in delight. The four of them stood in a little garden grotto not far from EF Havreem's office building. It stood at the quiet end of a city park, surrounded by an old stone retaining wall lush with flower-heavy vines. Tall green bushes, crowned with blue trumpet-shaped flowers, stood like sentries lining gardens that bordered the space in front of the walls. Below them grew bushy plants whose star-shaped green blossoms shouldn't have shown up against their leaves, but did. Everything exuded an aroma, and Rose could tell, from looking at EF Havreem's face, that he was indulging in the same olfactory feast she was.

"Most people visit the new gardens at the park's other end," the little man said. "Nice as they are, I like this older section, not least because it is largely ignored, especially during the week. I often come here to let the cares of the day slide away," he said. "Or at the very least, I can put them in perspective. No matter what I go through, these blossoms will smell sweet at the end of the day. I take that as a lesson."

He gestured to a set of chairs and benches at the foot of the grotto. "If you please? I have one more piece of history for you."

The Doctor took one bench for himself, sitting with his long legs outstretched on the seat. Jack and Rose took the stone bench opposite him, and EF Havreem settled comfortably into a round stone chair.

The Doctor spoke in a tone that brooked no more delay. "Like you said, I've been patient. But time's wastin', EF Havreem, and that makes me uncomfortable."

His target put up both hands and said placatingly, "No more wasting time, Doctor, of that you can be certain. Here is the story which leads to our little abandoned baby.

"The Slitheen entered our history about a century and a half of our time ago," EF Havreem said, his voice once again taking on a singsong cadence. "Again, close enough to your Earth measurement as makes no difference. They began with one woman, the daughter of two well-off parents in the Huspick province of the Plomeen Confederacy. Her mother was a merchant, her father was a professor at Huspick City Academy — a place of learning that is only now recovering its reputation in the civilized world because of this woman, mind you — and she seemed destined for greatness herself. She was a poet, and a writer of the most trenchantly powerful pieces of that century."

Rose leaned forward. "What was her name?"

"She is known now only as the Huspick Degenerate. Her other names were stripped from her. They are recorded in our history, but we do not speak them aloud," EF Havreem said, his voice flat. "Her clan name was Slitheen, of course.

"She was about 30 years of age, and an author of great renown, when her writings began to reveal a disturbing element of ... hmmm ... _yearning_ for an imagined purer past. She decried the cities, and the successes of modern life. She dismissed the arts and the gentle graces of Raxacoricofallapatorius as weaknesses which would have been eschewed by our ancestors. She praised the lives of hunting beasts, of merciless carnivores, as the lives most truly lived, in a constant battle for primacy, for purity of the race."

He shuddered, but went on. "Psychiatrists have since theorized that this woman's determined worship of the past, which most Raxcites just as determinedly ignore, for all the reasons of which I've made you aware, was a twisted and dysfunctional way of dealing with the ... self-respect issues that we as a species must face. A coping method that turns our failings into strengths, and that which we most despise in our history into praiseworthy things."

"You didn't have folks like that before?" Jack gnawed on his thumb as he spoke, dividing his attention between the Raxcite and the Doctor. His focus was almost as intense as the Doctor's, Rose thought; nothing seemed to intrude onto his observation of the two aliens. Must be a function of being a former Time Agent, she thought; that, or perhaps being a conman. But it doesn't explain why he's chewing on his thumb.

She looked over at the Doctor. That queer glint was in his eyes again. And, while EF Havreem might never notice it, she could see his jaw working. Now she knew why Jack was chewing his thumb. This wasn't good, she thought, before tuning back in to the conversation.

"Of course they have surfaced occasionally. Usually, however, their families are ashamed of such people, or worried enough about their mental health that they are treated away from the public eye. The difference here was in this woman's prodigious talents, both as a writer and in terms of personal charisma," EF Havreem responded. "Her later books and poetry came to be regarded with disgust by most people, but to certain members of our society — the young, the disaffected, those with criminal tendencies perhaps, and certainly many whose mental stability was as suspect as hers without benefit of her brilliance — flocked to her.

"Her ever more inflammatory writings were eventually banned in Huspick, and she emigrated to a neighboring city-state — my own home of Fel-Havreem, as it happens. That didn't last long because here, too, she insisted on a ... most vocal protestation of her philosophy. When she moved the second time, it was to Lilianeen Est Abrel. There she made the connection which changed an unpleasant but ultimately controllable sect, into the Slitheen.

"Lillianeen Est Abrel is a research city, like those she had quit earlier. This woman was raised among academics, and was unhappy unless she was living in cities friendly to them, apparently. I find that ironic, but that's neither here nor there. And for a while, it seemed as if she had decided to live quietly there, to avoid the constant surveillance of authorities. About three years after her move, however, she met a geneticist. A gifted one, from clan Hamazeen. They had a tumultuous affair, during which he became as besotted with her philosophy as he was of her— "

"I can see where this is goin'," the Doctor growled.

Rose looked up, startled. It wasn't like him to interrupt someone so rudely. She didn't like the look in his eyes, and shot a worried glance at Jack. He raised one eyebrow, and looked just as worried.

The Time Lord was on a roll now. "She convinced him to put his talents to rewriting the personal DNA of her and her followers, didn't he? Beef them up, give them claws like knives, and the haunches of lions, the speed of cheetahs, make the DNA generationally replicative — perennials, not annuals, am I right?"

EF Havreem looked at him, surprised, and gave a stiff nod.

"And perhaps this Hamazeen had access to technology he shouldn't have had, and understood it even less than you think your creators did, all those years ago," the Doctor continued before surging to his feet. He looked as if he were forcing himself not to pace. "He used it, and the children he and this woman had, and those of their followers ... the change inside their genes changed their heads, too, didn't it?"

Another stiff nod.

Now the Doctor was prowling, crossing and recrossing the narrow grotto just like the great cats of which he'd been speaking. "They and their kids, they became violent and sadistic, and they liked it. They made it all part of their philosophy; made all the killin' and cruelty a religion, chock full of ceremonies and liturgies. Within a couple of generations, the Slitheen and whatever clans allied with them had trained we don't know how many children to live for death and fear; to love killing and frightening ...." his voice trailed off, but the sorrow and disgust on his face said all that needed to be said.

"Oh, my god," Rose whispered into the silence. "They deliberately did that to themselves?"

"Rose, honey, you have no idea what people will do to themselves," Jack said, soft and sad. He looked at the Doctor. "Doc, you OK?"

"What? Nothin' wrong with me, Captain." Those blue eyes snapped back from some vista Rose couldn't see, into the here and now. "Times when the universe makes me a little queasy, is all. An' what we have to deal with right now, seems to me, is a way of makin' a tiny part of the universe a tiny bit better. Right, EF Havreem?"

The Raxcite had been staring off into some vista of his own, but turned his liquid eyes back to his guests. "Doctor?"

"The reason we started listenin' to all this unhappy history to begin with, eh? A little baby Slitheen sittin' back in Security's incubator. So—"

He brushed past EF Havreem, rubbing his hands, crazy grin plastered across his face as if he hadn't been angry and sick at heart a moment before. "I think it's time to undo a little genome damage, don't you?"

The Raxcite's mouth dropped open — not for the first time, Rose thought of a hungry baby — as he turned to look at her, then Jack, before turning and following the Doctor out of the grotto.

"And away we go," she said. Jack nodded, and they took off in pursuit, past a small class of children whose teacher joined them in looking curiously at the strange parade.

_tbc_


	4. Coddled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the blithe assurance of those who truly love science, but are completely illiterate in it, I have ventured to use it to provide us a happy ending for Blon; thank heavens that the Whoniverse is remarkably, and elastically, forgiving of scentific tomfoolery.
> 
> As always, the BBC owns it, I play with it, and take no coin for it. Thanks to my Best Beloved, once more, for making the product a little better.

"Why should it surprise you? You said we'd solve the problem, and there's only one way t'do that, short of murderin' a child, which I already knew was out of the question. I knew you'd be heading for a lab. Just consider my help a little something extra to do the job faster."

"You'll forgive my surprise, Doctor; there's nothing in the CV you provided us that indicates any genetics training."

The Doctor had his 'Are you so stupid I have to spell it out for you?' look on, and Rose thought EF Havreem's rather strained response was impressive, given that provocation. After all, she thought, it probably wasn't as if this rather expansive laboratory — complete with a team of Raxcite scientists and technicians (all of whom were now staring unashamedly through their clean room door at EF Havreem's retinue of aliens) — didn't have almost everything needed to adjust the infant Blon's DNA back to some non-murderous Raxacofallapatorian norm. It was also fairly obvious that this was a species which had, whether willingly or not, made genetics one of its scientific strengths and was a little tetchy about being shown up.

"Tell you what," the Time Lord said, "Have Dr. Elspan-Day Titheen check my figures against what her scans show. There's where your difficulty's been all along, you'll see."

EF Havreem pushed the clean room intercom button. "Have you been listening?"

ED Titheen nodded, and her bemused delight was obvious even through several inches of vacuum-sealed glass. "The Doctor is absolutely correct, sir, although I confess I can't understand why we didn't see it ourselves. If we'd been any closer to that pair of genes, they would have bitten us."

"Don't short yourselves," the Doctor said indulgently. "Slitheen DNA's a proper mess, and unstable to boot. I just happened to be workin' on a subject with a bit more stability. You've got a lot of work ahead of you, if you're planning on takin' my research and applying it to Slitheen in general."

"Understood, Doctor. Actually, I'm thinking of cross referencing what you've given us with some of the Slavereen records discovered years ago. That clan was always a bit less extreme in size and mutation, so they might provide us the stability we're—"

"The baby? What about the baby?" Rose asked, unable to bear her curiosity and worry a moment longer. "Is she going to be all right?"

ED Titheen heard the question, despite the hubbub simmering around her as the team worried at the Doctor's information. She smiled at Rose through the glass. "Officially, I should say it's too early to tell, since there are at least six more months of incubation in her future.

"But I think it's safe to say this little girl will grow up close to normal; perhaps a little tall, and rather more assertive than the rest of us, but sane, and happy."

Rose couldn't know how glorious her own relieved smile was. "That's brilliant! Thanks so much!"

Jack grinned, too. "Fantastic news." He turned and hugged her. "You can relax now, Rosie."

"Don't call me Rosie, you," she said, tongue between her teeth.

Jack's grin just got wider as he clapped the Doctor on the back. He wasn't chastised for the familiarity, which told Rose a lot about how relieved the Doctor was.

Which personage took his hands out of his jacket pockets and turned to EF Havreem. "And now, it's time for me and my friends to be on our way, wouldn't you say?"

"I do indeed, Doctor. Rose, Captain Harkness, if you'll follow me back to the staff car, we'll head back to headquarters to do the final sign-off." For the first time since they left the restaurant, their host seemed completely happy. That didn't alter when Rose took advantage of the seating arrangement in their car to lean over and ask quietly, "Mr. Havreem, when you capture adult Slitheen, what happens to them?"

"Hmmm? Oh. Oh, that's a sad situation. I'm afraid they're destined either for a lifetime in solitary confinement, or death by lethal injection, depending on which of our justice systems deals with them."

"No ... _torture_ of any kind?" she pressed, thinking of what Blon had told them about the judgment awaiting captured family members.

"Goodness no!" EF Havreem looked truly shocked. "We don't stoop to the kind of cruelty they practice on others. Even states or nations with the death penalty do it quickly and mercifully, although I can't say I approve even of that." He looked more closely at her, eyes very slightly narrowed. "I'm told Slitheen inculcate fear of capture in their children with some horrific stories. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, no reason," she said hastily, not wanting him to press her on that. "I just assumed that them being criminals, and going out to other worlds, too, being that way, would be punished severely."

"I think just being in a cell is a great punishment to them," EF Havreem said. It was clear he would say no more about it, but Rose felt her last little worry evaporate.

When Jack signed the last of the papers ("You handle it Captain, you've got the mind for bureaucratic nonsense, don't you?" was the Doctor's uncharitable direction), the three of them bid goodbye to Avrim Dul-Arm Entrepaar-Fel Havreem, who used the occasion to make one more attempt at polishing his English skills.

"Good blessings to you, Physician, and Captain Jack, and Rose Tyler," he said carefully. "I am become more than grateful, and am friendship-bound to you for our world. Many thanks for your extreme awesome medicine discovery ... but more for your mercies."

The Doctor smiled, Jack grinned, and — a little to her own surprise — Rose flung her arms around EF Havreem's neck. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you for telling us your story, and for dinner, and for the grotto."

"You are welcome, tiny Rose," EF Havreem whispered back. "Someday, maybe, you will return and tell me truth about the egg, yes?"

Rose stepped back and controlled her dismay with difficulty. EF Havreem smiled at her. "No worries now, Rose. Don't worry. Secret, for now." She nodded, not daring to say any more.

On their way back to the TARDIS, Jack pulled her away momentarily. "What did he say to you, sweetheart?"

"My secret, Jack. At least for now," she said, squeezing his hand by way of apology for her refusal to say anything.

"If it's anything that could calm _him_ down," he said, with a significant look over her shoulder. "Something's gnawing at him."

"Just like you were gnawin' on your thumb back there."

"I just hate to see him like that, you know?"

Jack's worry mirrored her own; she felt a rush of affection for him. "I do too. We'll talk, an' I promise, we'll get him-"

"Come on, you two. Save your conversation for the TARDIS," the Doctor's voice floated back.

Don't worry, Rose thought, Jack and I are planning a conversation.

_to be concluded_


	5. Good

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We come to the end of our Raxacoricofallapatorian (I _do_ love typing all iterations of that word) story, by introducing someone from the Doctor's past. As I was writing this story, I suddenly realized who could have been at the root of this planet's original problems. Fans of Old Who - tell me if I'm anywhere close (I remember the person in question, but didn't see adventures involving said personage all that often.)
> 
> Thanks for reading, many thanks to Best Beloved for editing (any mistakes are mine), and many, many thanks to the BBC and RTD for letting me play, unpaid and just for love, in their Whoniverse.

Once they were safely home, the Doctor's usual air of cheerful arrogance evaporated. He stood unmoving at the console, hands spread across it, eyes hooded. Jack's tentative conversational gambits went unanswered, and Rose at first hesitated to try any herself. She'd dashed herself on the rocks of his silence all too often to brave it without good reason, and all of a sudden she wasn't sure she had a good one. She and Jack both headed elsewhere for a few hours.

Eventually, though, both of them returned to the console room, drawn by the necessity of getting to the heart of their friend's unhappy state.

It didn't look as if the Doctor had moved an inch in all those hours.

Rose recognized how much frustration and curdled anger were hiding underneath his mute inaction. She knew the Slitheen had sparked his fierce wrath, but she was certain he'd been nothing but happy at the chance to give Blon a second chance. She thought back to Raxacoricofallapatorius, trying to remember everything that had taken place.

"Doctor?"

He didn't look up. "What?"

"Why did you look so upset and guilty about EF Havreem's story?"

"Who says I looked guilty?" He still wasn't looking at her. "Not fond of evolution gone wrong, me, but I've done nothin' to feel guilty about."

Across the console room, Jack turned to watch the Time Lord.

"We both saw how you reacted," she said, more sure of herself now. "You stopped talkin'. You knew all about the what-do-you-call-'ems, the Forerunners, and the Velox Levitas worlds, but you left the lesson to Jack; it was like you couldn't bear to talk. And then you got so angry in the grotto when he told us how the Slitheen came about that you couldn't sit still, nor stand still, either. That's how you act when you figure you've done something wrong."

"I don't know where you apes get your ideas," he said, pushing off from the console board to walk away from her. "Y'judge me by your standards, and keep makin' mistakes like that."

"It's not a mistake," she insisted. "And I know you have nothing to feel guilty about, so that's why I'm askin' you. What's wrong?"

For a moment she thought he was going to answer. Instead, he shook his head, and turned on his heel when he saw his route away from her put him in danger of walking straight to Jack. When he realized they had effectively flanked him, and blocked the door to the hallway, his approach changed again, and he was suddenly all Time Lord.

"It's none of your affair," he said, cold and dismissive.

If he'd thought that would cow Rose, he'd badly misjudged her.

"Don't you _dare_ say that!" she flared, stalking over to him, pushing at one shoulder until he turned to face her directly. His face went dark with rage, but she didn't care; she went further and poked him in the chest, her face up in that darkness of his, in her best Jackie Tyler imitation. "An' don't you _dare_ to get angry at _us_ for askin'! We were all involved in this, you an' me an' Jack! We decided together to bring Blon here, and we all helped catch her.

"Come to think of it, I was there when you met the Slitheen — they _hunted_ me, and I helped you figure out who they were in the first place, and told you to go ahead and bomb Number 10 to defeat them, and ... and one of them tried to eat my _mum,_ thank you very much, in case you'd forgot that, so everything about the Slitheen is just as much my affair as yours.

"An' if you hadn't remembered, we're supposed to be a team, and you're the designated driver, so when you go all silent and unhappy, I think me and Jack have a right to know why.

"Besides," she said, her voice lower, "d'you think we like seeing you so unhappy? What kind of friends would that make us?"

The Doctor stood slack-jawed at her assault. When he looked over at Jack, the Captain shook his head. "Don't look at me. I agree with her."

Rose held her breath. Would it work?

It did. She watched the darkness retreat, the ice melt from his eyes, and waited.

He finally slumped, not quite defeat and not quite relief.

"Captain, did any of your clever Agency instructors ever tell you about Miasimia Goria?"

Another conversational u-turn, and worthy of EF Havreem's hairpin navigational approach, but Jack took it in stride. After a moment of thought, he shook his head again. "I've never heard that term. A person? A planet?"

The Doctor laughed without humor. "Both, s'pose, in the royal sense. It was a planet run by an old ... colleague of mine. Woman who called herself the Rani."

"Colleague of yours?" Jack looked at Rose. She shrugged in acknowledged ignorance.

"Yes. And, yes, she was from my home planet. We went to school together."

Rose sat down on the jumpseat, patiently waiting to see where this was taking them. She wasn't willing to say anything that might cause him to change his mind about talking. The Doctor generally avoided any mention of his destroyed home world, and Rose was hungry for anything that could help her understand him better, both in this particular instance and in general.

"She was brilliant, mind better than almost all of our Academy instructors, and twice as arrogant as any of them. She thought I was a fool ... but she thought most of us were fools. Had nothin' but disdain for immaterial things like right and wrong. Thought they were arbitrary rules for the weak-minded. The only thing she had any belief in was science. The only person she had much respect for was— " He stopped momentarily. "Her specialty — one of her specialties — was xeno-genetics. And she saw no reason why she shouldn't go out and get raw material for her research from the universe at large. As far as she was concerned, even sentient species were only valuable if she could use them in her studies. Her experiments. Even the most conservative, bigoted Time Lord rejected her attitude. She was eventually expelled from Time Lord society, but she didn't give a damn. It freed her up, actually.

"She used my planet's technology and knowledge to find just the right world, just the right species. She found them, and enslaved their world. Miasimia Goria. They didn't look at it that way, not in the end. Worshiped her as a goddess, and she used them, the entire population, as lab rats.

"Now what does that remind you of, Rose Tyler?"

It wasn't difficult to connect the dots. "Are you saying this Rani was behind the Forerunners?"

"Nope. Not in the least. Those creatures had some belief system. I might not hold with what they did, but they did it for something other than intellectual curiosity," the Time Lord said, and Rose realized, with a chill, that he'd probably met Forerunners. "The Rani has — had — nothing but intellectual curiosity.

"But I think it's very possible — probable, even — that she was fiddlin' about on Raxacoricofallapatorius's veldt 10,000 years in its past. It's the sort of thing she'd have loved doin'. It stinks of her, actually." He was leaning against one of the TARDIS struts, and put his head back against its coral solidity. Rose saw his eyes close, saw a double pulse in his exposed throat.

"And _I_ think," Jack said cooly, "that you had nothing to do with what this Rani did, and that you are — as usual — putting yourself needlessly through hell."

The Doctor stiffened, but opened his eyes, and trained them on the Captain. Two blue gazes, icy and warm, locked and engaged.

"You don't understand," the Doctor began, before Jack interrupted him with a snort, a gesture of disrespect the leather-clad Gallifreyan rarely suffered.

"Doc, don't even think of pulling the 'I'm alien' bit on me. Here's the thing. I understand that you think you have to answer for the sins of every Time Lord psycho who ever existed, because you're the only one left. You don't. It's as simple as that.

"And in this case, seeing as how you gave our friends back there a leg up on saving any Slitheen kids they might find, or maybe even solving the Slitheen problem completely in the future, you went above and beyond the call. If you're not satisfied with that, you're an idiot. A genius, but an idiot."

He laughed. "And that's all the analysis I'll subject you to — as long as you promise to wise up. After all, I don't imagine I'll ever understand you. Hell, you're the last survivor of a race that disappeared from the universe and covered that up by _changing the fabric of time._ That's the kind of parlor trick no one's ever duplicated, although the Time Agency would sell its corporate soul to try, assuming it had one, and assuming they even knew you guys had pulled it off.

"What else? You feel time in your bones. You're 900 years old — and pretty damned well-preserved for a nonocentenarian, might I add, cheekbones to die for, and what I wouldn't give to check out what's under your ... jumper — and you travel around in a dimensionally transcendent blue box that thinks for itself most of the time."

"Two hearts, don't forget that," the Doctor said with the faintest ghost of a rueful smile. Jack's cheeky hyperbole, coming as it did on the heels of his calm and accurate analysis of the doctor's current mental state, was hard to withstand. Rose was fighting a case of the giggles herself.

"How could I? I intend to win at least one of them."

Now it was the time Lord's turn to snort, as Jack walked over to him. "Haven't bought me that drink yet." But the smile was stronger, and Rose watched the tic in his jaw quiet.

"Well, we can't have that, can we? Point us in the direction of some really good bourbon, why don't you?"

The Time Lord abruptly pulled himself upright, and his very unexpected grab at Jack's shoulders surprised a very un-Jack-like yip out of the Captain. "What do you think, Rose Tyler? Do you think we should go drinking?"

She joined them. "Can I get a big glass of eggnog?"

The looks Jack and the Doctor gave her were more than worth the rubbish joke.

The rotor danced to the rhythm of the vortex as the three of them laughed.

-30-


End file.
